So Dark the Heart of Man
by Hydriatus
Summary: With a sefadu unit MIA in the Lost Margin, the CCC deploy the Yellowjackets to investigate. But the Lost Margin is a whole different world to what the MERCS are used to...


_"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving."_

_Colonel Kurtz_

_Apocalypse Now_

* * *

For once, the interior of the transport was bright. Dust swirled through the open doors, agitated by the blades spinning through the air. Below, the savannah landscape rolled past, dotted with the occasional clump of trees. Danny Williams' eyes narrowed as he focused on some startled gazelle, bounding away as the helicopters passed overhead. His helmet kept most of the dust out, but he could still feel his throat growing dry.

He turned his view away from the doors and back inside the transport, towards his team. The four other Yellowjackets were strapped into their seats, just as he was, their helmets on. Blank visages met his gaze before he looked away, nodding at the two support members acting as door gunners for the Oriole. They nodded back to him, and turned to continue scanning the landscape below. Both men were stationed behind the transport's Sledgehammer FFS', nearly identical weapons to the one carried by Jackson, the Yellowjacket's heavy assault specialist.

Williams let his eyes focus on the HUD in his helmet, displaying the conditions of his team. All signs were reading normal, though the occasional glitch tended to flash a warning light in the corner of his vision. He sighed. The dust was going to cause some minor interference, but they would compensate. It was what the MERCS of CCC were known for, just like the steel it produced – able to bend, but never break.

"Team 1, what is your current status?" chimed a voice in his ear. Their friendly operator back at HQ.

"This is Team 1, status steady. The armor is experiencing minor glitching due to the dust though."

"Understood. Teams 2 and 3 are reporting similar instances. Is it liable to decrease the team's effectiveness?"

"Only in the case of sensors or communications, and even then it's only for a second at most."

"Duly noted Team 1." And then Timothy went silent. Probably conferring with the R&amp;D about figuring out a way to make the armor dust proof. The nanites in CCC gear would keep a trooper going and their armor in one piece, but they were hardly designed for dealing with such conditions. However, unless a dust storm kicked up – a distinctly unlikely possibility according to sefadu – the issues were minor enough to overlook.

There was a sudden shift in the sound of the rotors, and Williams felt the floor of the transport helicopter shift slightly, and the landscape began to blur below when he glanced outside. The two gunners – Geoff and Gary, he remembered now – held onto their guns as the Oriole increased it's speed.

Williams raised an eyebrow as he looked at the left gunner. "What's going on?" he asked, his voice being transmitted to the other man's helmet. At leas they wouldn't have to worry about being heard over the noise of the engine and blades.

The gunner turned to look at him, the IFF tagging him as Geoff. "Seems like they've detected us. Lot of activity on the scanner." Not that he could tell of course, peering out into the glaring brightness of the African daylight. His helmet must have been linked up with the pilots, much in the same way Williams' Yellowjackets were linked to each other. "Several vehicles, moving fast along the road."

Williams' frowned at that. They had entered the Lost Margin bordering sefadu territory about twenty minutes ago, heading north through the savannah to their target. In that time they had encountered nothing, which in his book was always a good thing. But as they went deeper into the lawless wilderness, he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. They had detected nothing of course, but that meant little.

The FCC were masters of hiding, even better than KemVar in some cases. At least the KemVar camo system left behind a hazy or blurred outline, like evaporation. The FCC rats on the other hand, could legitimately vanish from sight, blending with the terrain in a way none of the MERCS could – high tech armor made it easy to be tagged and located.

And now they had finally stumbled across some signs of life. Of course it could be little more than a bunch of poor civilians, displaced from their homes after being fired by sefadu. Or it could be an FCC weapon shipment. Which was none of their concern either. The Yellowjackets deployed on this mission had one mission and one mission only: search and destroy.

* * *

"We're what?" asked Ramirez, staring at him incredulously.

"You heard me," Williams said, strapping on the pouches holding extra ammunition. "Sefadu have lost a team in the Lost Margin."

"So what? They afraid the FCC's going to reverse engineer their laser tech in a cave somewhere with a box of scraps?" smirked Katherine, rolling her shoulders to make sure the armor was attached properly, unable to impede her movement.

"Not lost as in dead. Lost as in defected," explained the Assault Leader, checking over his rifle as he lifted it off the rack.

"Oh. That's bad," said Ramirez with a slight nod.

Williams held back the urge to sigh. Not for the first time he wished his team was regualry briefed alongside him. But no, the Directors office only had room for him to stand there and listen to his mission. And it fell to him to brief the rest of the squad. It all seemed so inefficient in his eyes. Still, it was beyond his power to change at the moment. Once he earned that promotion, then he could start making some changes to CCC's MERCS.

A fully detailed briefing pack had been provided, but true to form, Williams' Yellowjacket's had only, at best, skimmed it. Ramirez often found other distractions to amuse him, whilst Kat was too busy reading and revising her curriculum. Jackson and Finch on the other hand never worried about the particulars of their mission. No matter what the objective, their roles were always the same. Stand somewhere and fling lead about, or make sure no one was bleeding or immobile respectively.

"Of course our superiors realized the potential troubles this could cause, especially in regards to our ammunition supplies." It was no big secret that CCC and sefadu enjoyed close ties, the CCC providing cheap materials in return for the diamonds harvested in sefadu territory that were used in the manufacture of the ammunition for the DC4500 assault rifle.

With insider knowledge, the FCC could effectively run guerrilla attacks to disrupt the productivity of the diamond mines, impairing CCC MERCS effectiveness in the field. That was simply unacceptable.

* * *

"Look lively, we got incoming!" Gary said, his voice crackling slightly in Williams' ear as the dust continued to swirl throughout the inside of the Oriole, the aircraft suddenly banking sharply to one side. The Assault Leader was silently thankful for being strapped into his seat, spying sky out through the right side of the helicopter. The slightly more alarming thing however was the white contrail that streaked across it.

"What was that?" he asked, turning to face Geoff, Gary already flicking off the safety as the Oriole straightened out, the Sledgehammer gun roaring as it opened fire. The door gunner was traversing his own weapon as he replied. "A SAM, shoulder mounted. Launched off the back of one of those vehicles down below."

Williams swore under his breath as he unbuckled his restraints, hooking himself onto the rail running along the ceiling of the cabin as he moved to get a better view of the situation. He could see a dirt track running through the savannah over Gary's shoulder as the transport moved in an arc to encircle the hostile vehicles, aiming to catch them in a crossfire. The gunner was unleashing a fearsome torrent of fire upon the enemy below, riddling the road with small craters and plumes of earth as he tracked the rearmost vehicle.

He zoomed in on it, his helmet providing a round outline. Some kind of old pickup, with a turret welded onto the back. Welded together out of scrap and held together with hope, typical FCC construction. Williams smiled thinly in satisfaction as the hail of bullets from the door gun caught up with the light truck and chewed it in half, the engine detonating and making it flip over. He looked up, seeing the other Oriole flying parallel to his, it's door guns blazing at the lead vehicle. The small pickup swerved off the road, narrowly missing the trail of bullets.

"Where's our escort?" demanded Williams, spying another rocket being launched from the scattering convoy, flying up and narrowly missing Unit 2's Oriole before detonating, buffeting the craft and nearly making it spin out of control. Gripping the bar with all his strength he stared out the open doors, seeking out the sefadu attack helicopters that had been assigned to them. The three machines, known as Lion Squadron, had flown on ahead, clearing the way for the Oriole's. At least that had been the plan. How they had missed these vehicles was beyond him, but then again, the Oriole's could handle them without undue difficulty.

The helicopter swung away as another heavy weapon opened up below, this time a heavy caliber rapid firing gun. Bullets hammered into the underside of the transport, making Williams wince involuntarily, half-expecting the bullets to start tearing through the thin under armor. He felt the vehicle shift and begin climbing, as the third Oriole flew in with both it's door guns firing away at the remaining targets. And then they were stable, and the only sound was the beating of the blades against the air.

Williams glanced at the gunners who grinned back at him, and then looked at his team with a sigh. "Well, I think we're going the right way," he said to them, moving to sit down again. There was

little for him to do if they did run into another convoy like that. They had been lucky there had been no dedicated anti-air units in that group, since no matter how advanced something was, enough bullets in it would cause damage. He had seen his own armor fail from too many pistol shots. Maybe the USCR was onto something with that oversized hunk of metal they called armor...

"Probably, but attacking like that reeks of desperation," offered Finch, double checking the ammo clip on his weapon. All their guns were loaded of course – the whole point of being a MERCS was to respond instantly to a developing situation.

Williams nodded his agreement. "True, but it's never a good idea to underestimate the FCC Houses," he reminded his team. "Especially since they may be operating with sefadu gear as well at the moment."

His team chorused their acknowledgments as Gary caught his attention with a wave of his hand. "Dropzone coming up. Another ten minutes to go. Seems like the sefadu have lit up the outer defenses." The assault leader tilted his head to one side as he began to spy more and more patches of flame and churned ground out the open door. The sefadu were being their typical selves in this operation – rushing the enemy, ruining any kind of defensive plan the FCC may have had with speed and force.

"Alright, time to get these negotiations started," laughed Kat, hefting her incinerator.

* * *

_-Intercepted transmission-_

_-Source: The Lost Margin-_

_-Destination: Unknown-_

_Though publicly the MERCS units are mere enforcers of the megacorporations, in truth it is more accurate to describe them as an infantry formation. It is difficult to ascertain exactly how many MERCS members each corporation has, but they must surely number in the thousands. What many of the worker-citizens do not realize is that the famed units – the Yellowjackets, the Stone, the Dogs of War and others, are actually the most famous squads out of a platoon of troopers._

_We have seen in the past roughly 30+ MERCS bearing the livery of the Yellowjackets engaging an equal number of KemVar's Dogs of War, even though at best we have established that both teams number, at most, ten members. The conclusion is simple – the units we know about are merely the most well known and publicized members of a far larger combat group._

_If this is true, than we must consider the possibility that each team deployed by a megacorporation is in fact part of a platoon depending on their armour – such as the much less known CCC Redshirts, or the imposing black plated monsters of USCR's Ursus team. Whilst I doubt each of these platoons numbers over four squads (since that is the most we've seen deployed in a single livery, and that was during the assault on KemVar's HQ), it could also be that the corporations are merely using all their teams in one massed group to hide the actual numbers of their MERCS from each other._

_A wise precaution, though one we must investigate further. Though we fight to free the world of corporate control, have we ever actually considered the size of the task facing us? This is talk of defeatism, but rather a warning that we may require a more concentrated effort to achieve any lasting results._

_-Message Intercept Ends-_

_-Further Data Unrecoverable-_

_ADDENDUM: Seems like our reports are true, and we are not the only ones to have at least a hundred MERCS available for deployment. CCC Yellowjacket units 1, 2, and 3 have been deployed to Africa to assist Sefadu. Send Yellowjacket 4 along with Browncoat 2 and Whitecloak 3 to perform routine hostile acquisition of Kezai Waza assets – we need to start investigation the actual numbers of our competitors security details._

* * *

**A/N:** Something I wrote a while ago. MERCS is the property of Megacon Games._  
_


End file.
